I was wandering the gravel streets of Earthaven Ecovillage when I happened into an on-the-go conversation with Jonathan, a resident in his early thirties, as he was bringing buckets of feed to some chickens. Taking the “who the hell are you” look as a cue to introduce myself and this project, I did those things, and he told me a little about himself. Jonathan grew up Catholic. He left the religion behind because, at some point - he couldn’t recall any specific event - it simple didn’t resonate with him anymore. He’s been at Earthaven six years now and says he’d come “to live in better harmony with the land.” Suffice to say, he is exactly the person I’ve been looking to listen to.

So I asked him my questions (“Do you believe in God?”), and at my mention of the G-word, he hesitated: he doesn’t really use that word anymore. “You know in church,” he says by way of explanation, “the congregation is asked very seriously ‘Do you believe in God and Jesus Christ?’ and everyone is supposed to answer gravely in unison ‘yes.’” The implication of this statement was clear: Once you begin to feel personally disconnected from the language of liturgy and ritual in the religious service, experiencing the phenomena of sitting amongst a group of people who all speak that language in the same tone at the same time can be…disquieting. It can feel a little like you’re suddenly sitting in a pack of zombie-automatons, your parents and friends leaving their thoughts behind to become one-with-the-group. And when you’re not a part of that one, the only thing left to be is the “other.” I think it’s fair to say that to the individual thinker, nothing is more terrifying than being surrounded by the mass of unquestioningly-common-minded folk. Consider Emerson’s lament “but now we are a mob” in Self-Reliance. (Another good line from the same essay: “I like the silent church before the service begins, better than any preaching”).

Jonathan went through a familiar trajectory for those who undergo the whole ordeal of leaving the religious traditions of their upbringing. He believed himself an atheist for awhile, but finding that both emotionally unfulfilling and rationally suspect, he now speaks of “the great mystery,” and uses words like “honor and reverence” in describing how he tries to approach this mystery. “It’s not right to call it ‘intelligent’ by human standards,” he says, “but it’s not just chaos and randomness out there.” And then he paused a moment. “I do wish we had a common cosmology,” he says. “Common cosmology?” “Yeah, some kind of common language, or practice. Some common mythology, or belief for spiritual understanding. It’d be nice in this country. I think that’s the biggest divide, the belief divide. That and the gender divide.” (More on the “gender divide” and spirituality in later posts).

Interesting.

The Wish for Common Cosmology

As I’ve mentioned, Earthaven is an ecumenical community, which is to say that Jews and Christians and Quakers and Wiccans and Buddhists and Hindus, etc. find space there to meaningfully worship. In a lot of ways, this sounds like the epitome of the American promise. People of different faiths finding common cause to live together in Community, respectfully allowing each other to worship as they will, and successfully striving to live each day in better harmony with themselves, the earth, and each other.

And yet, the longing for the common cosmology, the standard set of stories and practices known and understood by all, persists.

It's an issue as old as religion itself. Here’s an e.g. through the Jewish lens: Traditionally, the minyan, the group of at least ten adults that has come together to pray, is considered to be speaking to God with one transcendent soul. This singular soul of the many is therefore greater, which is maybe to say prays with a louder voice or is transmutative into greater spiritual feeling, than the sum of the individual souls who have gathered together in the prayer space. It’s basic synergy: the whole becoming greater than the sum of its parts, and it is, in the opinion of this writer, a ripe and beautiful thought. However, the question that arises is hard to ignore: Would the ascendant spirituality of the ten-as-one be possible if three of those ten didn’t know the words to the prayers? And then the even more difficult question: what to do with those unlearned three?

This came up in my discussion with Kaitlin Lindsay Johnston, resident Wiccan priestess at Earthaven. She spoke about the difficulty in making the rituals of Wicca meaningful, for those in the community who are interested, for herself, and even those who find their spiritual homes in other religions. There is a committee that works on organizing Wiccan festivals and ceremonies, she told me, but it’s difficult to make it a regular gathering. “I’d like to get more of a solid group that does it all together,” she says, “But so far it’s just me and I find people for the different roles that we need for each ritual.”

So the question again: how to maintain the integrity of the spiritual practice so as to bring about deeper feelings of connectedness (get through the doorways to the divine) while also making the uninitiated feel welcome? And lacking a solid answer to this question, is there a way to at least understand the question better?

Keep those thoughts bubbling in your subconscious a minute. First, a short fall down a…..

Rabbit Hole: Into The Clogged Heart of America

The conflict between the individual and the group isn’t something exclusive to religion and prayer. The protection of a person’s individual sovereignty over their own space (“space” being interpreted on the spectrum of “individual mind and body” to “10,000 square foot house on 100 acres of ‘privately owned’ land”), and the societally-advantageous, synergistically-driven desire to have like-minded, efficient, and constructive social groups, are like two thick ropes densely entangled around the beating heart of the American experiment. Sometimes this knot squeezes so tightly as to make the heart stop.

Think of the individual who is denied health insurance coverage for a potential life-or-death issue because the presentation of their symptoms doesn’t match up with the carrier’s “group standard” for that illness (this happens). Or, extended beyond the individual, think of a homogenous cultural group, maybe of immigrants, who are told they’re only welcome in America if they forfeit the customs and traditions of their heritage (or as Republican presidential hopeful Bobby Jindal (what a guy) put it, “Immigration without assimilation is invasion.”) One of the promises of this country (in theory if not yet fully in practice) is the protection of the individual against the onslaught of the mob. It’s one of the reasons why lynchings are so particularly evil, and are among the the biggest and ugliest smirch marks in our history. (It’s also the reason why Atticus Finch’s dispersal of the mob that’s come to lynch Tom Robinson at the jailhouse in To Kill a Mockingbird is so heroic. Of interest: How does Atticus do it? By calling out the mob-members individually by name).

And yet there is, of course, the flip side. The work required for the righting of injustices in this country (and the world) would seem to require mass-movements of like-minded people who are willing to put aside their individual desires for the betterment of society at large. Concede too much to the demands and concerns of lone-voices, so the argument goes, and initiatives like Women's Suffrage, Abolition, the Civil Rights Movement, Marriage Equality, Environmentalism, all the way to Black Lives Matter become dulled, washed out, which is to say, less effective in the effort to right the injustices they set out to fight. Indeed, the principle of absolute inclusion is one of the things that doomed the Occupy Wall-Street movement. “We are the 99%” is a great slogan until you have to listen to all 100% of that 99%, at which point focus - that necessary virtue for accomplishment in most endeavors- on any one issue is quickly forfeited.

I bring up the tensions in this rabbit hole not because I know of any tried-and-true solutions to de-tensing them, but to illustrate that, while a discussion of purity in spiritual worship is the topic of this blog post, these conflicts are really everywhere. If they are to be better managed, their acknowledgment becomes the responsibility of both the individual and the group. At which point, the best we can do is to try to be aware of them, and work to resuscitate the heart as best we can every time that it stops.

Alright, complexities of American Society aside….

On Wicca

If it can be said that there is at least one common-denominator of spirituality at Earthaven, and I’d imagine this is likely to be true in most ecovillages, it’s in the feeling of connection to, and maybe even reverence for, nature.

Kaitlin Lindsay Johnston spoke to me one morning about her belief in Wicca’s deification of nature. She tells it: “One of my big ahas early on [came when] I was taking a comparative religions class in college and the professor said something about the traditional Abrahamic religions. That, in them, God is there and we are here, and this table is a table. We’re all separate. Brought up Lutheran, that’s how we thought of it, God was there and we are here. But I don’t want to live in a world where God is so separate from us. And,” she adds, “it doesn’t feel real to me either.”

That feeling of unreality in God’s separation from the world (maybe a feeling similar to Jonathan’s lack of “resonance” in Catholicism) sent her down the path to Wicca, which acknowledges the holy power of Mother Earth and the cosmology of Nature. The appeal to spiritual seekers will be quickly apparent: Nature, that expansive living thing that exists outside humanity’s absolute control, and is wordlessly unable to tell lies, assigned into a system of beliefs that we can access through sensory experience every day. And this, rationally bolstered by the fact that all things in this world, even those manufactured and processed a thousand times over, really do find their origins somewhere in nature (even alien technology comes from the natural universe). So it makes sense that, among the primary practices of this religion (aside from believing in it) comes in celebrating the eight Earth holidays, times when the planet's natural relationship with the Sun and Moon and whole universe beyond are most recognizable: the two solstices and equinoxes, and the four cross-quarter days (the days that fall between the solstices and equinoxes).

Holiday celebrations are, as with most religions, enacted through ritual. While at first in her spiritual wanderings Kaitlin didn’t think much of ritual - “What’s the point of ritual?” she remembers thinking, “The sun’s gonna rise in the morning. That’s kind of the point of believing so strongly in the Earth: Things are gonna happen without us”- now she understands it differently. “The point of ritual” she says, “is not to make sure things in nature keep happening, but for us to connect and to feedback to the holy that gives us our life.”

With roots in a wide-array of ancient Celtic and Pagan practice, as well as a twentieth-century revivalist element, Wiccans have varying methods of carrying out these rituals. Kaitlin gives me the structure in brief: “In a typical Wiccan ritual, you clear and consecrate the space, you cast the circle: that means you’re sending out energy in a sphere around the ritual space to hold the energy that is raised. Often you’ll have some tool, or just your finger, and you’ll walk around the periphery of the circle and send out energy in a sphere. Then call in the quarters, call in the directions, call in goddess and god, whichever deity you choose, and then you state the intention of the ritual. Then you do the main ritual work, and that varies according to the ritual you’re doing. After the main ritual work you have sharing of cakes and ale. Or it can be cookies and juice. And then thanking the deity, thanking and sending off the directions, and then taking down the circle.”

In that same vein, there’s an array of different gods and goddesses with which to build relationships of worship. Kaitlin, who was trained in Dianic Feminist Witchcraft, says, “Each goddess has different qualities. A lot of Wiccans might say there’s ‘the Goddess’ that is the archetype. That she contains all the goddesses. And then there’s specific goddesses from different cultures. For me it’s nice to work with a specific goddess because you can feel even more of a personal relationship. A lot of times lately I’ve worked with Brigid who’s a Celtic goddess.”

Kaitlin’s family hails from Scotland and Ireland, and she notes that part of her work with the goddess Brigid (who shares her name with St. Brigid, patron saint of Ireland) makes her feel connected to her ancestors.

On the issue of common cosmology, even for justthe practitioners of Wicca, Kaitlin says it’s a point of constant work, “trying to find a balance between having our rituals be accessible to everyone and feel good to everyone, so that they feel it’s not foreign to them, that it’s for them. But not having it so bland or washed out that it’s meaningless. Samhain” she says (that’s Halloween), “I let it be really Wiccan.

It’s worth noting that Kaitlin says Samhain is the most successful, participatory Wiccan festival at Earthaven. For that festival, residents gather to have an “ancestral feast.” Over the course of a long meal, one by one people rise and tell stories of their ancestors. Nearly everyone participates. Some of them repeat the same stories every year. More than one person at Earthaven, Wiccans and non-Wiccans alike, told me this was an event of some deep spiritual meaning.

A Short Meditation from The Karliner Rebbe ​All this thought of reaching for commonality in worship, and in life, reminds me of a teaching that 18th century Hasidic rebbe Aharon of Karlin used to espouse. Here it is: If two Hasidim, strangers to each other, happen to meet on the winding road, it is incumbent upon them to do some kind of learning or prayer together. Why? Because it is written that two or more always have the ability to speed the redemption of humankind from its sufferings. And so, if the two are both well learned, says the rebbe, let them study the deep mysticisms of the Kabbalah and become transported together to the higher planes of dancing angels and ringing trumpets, and their access to the secrets of the divine will bring benefit to all of humanity. And if one of them does not know how to study Kabbalah? Then let them both study the arguments between the rabbis of the Talmud and find meaning together in the intricacies and difficulties of those debates, for through arguments and extrapolations, change for the better comes about. And if one of them does not know the language of the Talmud? Then let them tell each other stories of the Bible, and delight in the lessons to be gleaned from the trials and lives of all those characters of myth and history. And if, as it happens, one of them does not even know the stories of the Bible? Well, let them sing a simple song together and dance in the joy of each other’s company. And what if, God forbid, one of them does not even know how to sing, is in fact not able to even move enough to engage in the simplest of dances? Aha, says the rebbe, then let the two love each other, and that will be enough to hasten our redemption.

This blog documents an ongoing journey-event, and so while each blog post is written to (hopefully) stand alone, the context of past posts might also (hopefully) enhance the reading experience. And check out the Mission Statement.​Enjoy!Daniel

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